An analysis of global conflicts and international events by the scrutiny of reason

Monthly Archives: March 2010

The Australian academic Chris Doran in his article on Online Opinion on August 3, 2008, accuses and condemns the Coalition forces in their attack on Fallujah on November 2004 of breaching the Geneva Conventions and of committing war crimes. But in his passionate condemnation he disregards the fact that wars are not fought by holding the sword in one hand and the Ten Commandments in the other. An ineradicable law of war is that its prolongation increases its brutality in ‘geometrical’ proportions and hence its casualties in civilians and the military.

The action in Fallujah had the strategic goal to shorten the war. Fallujah was a hornet’s nest of foreign and local jihadists who were not only manufacturing the lethal car bombs but also sending their suicidal fanatic warriors in other cities of Iraq. The collateral civilian casualties, not in the huge overblown fictional figures presented by the writer of the article, were inevitable in a war that the enemy uses civilians and, indeed, members of his own family and relatives as a shield. And the question arises who is the real moral culprit and war criminal in such a case. It’s obvious however, that Doran in the heat of his pacifist hate of all wars, whether justified or not, has no propensity to even deal with this question, least of all answer it.

“The administration has long” wrongly “argued that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should be tried in civilian court.” Clemons of course would be loathe to admit that Obama’s administration might have realized its great mistake politically and strategically to prosecute Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court and is ready now to be corrected for its stupendous error by “the dark side,” to quote Clemons, methods of former vice-president Cheney and chief of staff of the Bush administration David Addington, which politically and strategically were always on the correct side.

Liberals who tend to support a civilian prosecution for the mastermind of 9/11 are fugitives from reality and are impresarios of a burlesque show trial, since members of the administration like Press Secretary Gibbs and Attorney General Holder already publicly declared him to be guilty. And as Nadine hints to the critics of military tribunals, among who is Clemons himself, and who are in favour of a show trial for Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court, the way to hellishly bankrupt arguments is paved with good intentions.

The concept of the “Axis of Evil” had a politically pragmatic Machiavellian sense in the context of religious-riddled America, and not a metaphysical one. Religion can also be used not only as “glue” to societal values that binds people and commands them, as the French sociologist Emile Durkheim suggested, but also as glue to certain critical foreign policies that are vital to the security of a nation. Apropos the Axis of Evil in the context of global terrorism and the rogue states which support it overtly or covertly. Statesmanship does not govern in a vacuum; it has to rally its people, like Churchill did, by certain concepts that appeal to them behind its policies and strategies. Neo-conservatives as pragmatists are amoral, and have no relationship with any kind of Manichaeism, of good and evil.

Interestingly, WigWag’s first comment in The Washington Note, ironically as a past opponent and slightly diminishing opponent presently of the neocons, has loosened all the “demons” of neo-conservatism from their “caves” to come and haunt all liberals in their wishful thinking that Obama was a game-changer. From the “prince of darkness,” Richard Perle, who presciently said in 2002 that “we are all neoconservatives now,” Wolfowitz, Feith, Frum, the Kristols and the Kagans, Cheney and Bolton, have taken the centre stage of American politics by “winning the argument,” according to WigWag, and shattering the unrealistic, idealistic, nursery rhymed policies of the liberals, and especially Obama’s.

And presumably even the White House is presently neo-conservative turf as Obama himself has become their disciple, according to WigWag. But Obama is the bastard offspring of the neocons as he was conceived not by their spiritual virility but by the impotent idealistic policies of his own, which in a profligacy of ‘many nights stands’ on the domestic and international arena proved to be total failures, as the neoconservatives had predicted they would be. The clang sound of the chain of failures in health care, in climate change, in his toothless supine diplomacy in the Middle East, in his hope of changing the view of America’s enemies by practicing American values and asking for penance from those wronged from America’s past ‘sins’, have forced President Obama to semi-adopt the policies of the neocons. Being a ‘pragmatic chameleon’ he had to change his colors purely for his own political survival. Obama is no voluntary convert to neo-conservatism. He is perforce adopting and implementing some of the policies of the neoconservatives because they are the only reasonable policies in town and the only ones that can save his political scalp. It’s due to the poverty of liberal policies that Obama is ostensibly attempting to become politically a ‘nouveau riche’ from the wealthy and fecund policies of the neo-conservatives.

WigWag responded to the above as follows:

Kotzabasis, I enjoyed this comment and think you made some excellent points; especially when you characterize Obama as the “bastard offspring” of the neoconservatives.

At the risk of sounding wishy-washy, I’m not sure that it’s a question of whether I was once an opponent of the neocons or am slightly less of an opponent now.

I thought the war in Iraq was a mistake for the United States and the West. Whether it was a mistake for Iraq is an open question. Clearly the Kurds are delighted that the United States invaded and eliminated Saddam Hussein; presumably the Shia are too. The Sunni, not so much.

I think it’s hard to argue that the War in Iraq has not left the United States and all of its allies worse off than they were before the invasion…

But opponents of the neoconservatives will be making a serious mistake themselves if they think that the failures in Iraq or other errors in judgment by leading neoconservatives prove that as a philosophy neo-conservatism is wrong.

After all, the serious tactical blunders that the United States made in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia didn’t prove that containment was the wrong strategy to confront the Soviets.

The following piece was written and first published on September 2009. It’s republished here as Americans are realizing that they have elected a dud as president.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Obama is like someone who has inherited great wealth (read political power) only to squander it in senseless profligate excesses. He appeased the Russians, as I predicted he would, with the withdrawal of the missiles installation from Czechoslovakia and Poland at the expense of close allies; he tried to browbeat Israel with his no settlement pronunciamento to no avail, as he and his close advisers, including Clinton, astonishingly misread the position of the majority of Israelis on the issue and paying the high price of increasing Palestinian expectations and inadvertently making it a condition for its leadership, that never existed before, for direct talks with Israel; he tried in his Cairo speech to reach a rapprochement with Muslims by praising with intellectual blindness the great achievements of Islam prior to the Renaissance while sweeping under the carpet the great failure of Islam with unprecedented wealth in its hands in our era, without receiving any conciliatory gestures from those who were so gloriously exalted; and presently he is opening negotiations with the illegitimate government of Iran with no explicit and clear restrictions on its nuclear program at the expense of the democratic forces of the country with their great potential to oust the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad regime, if the Obama administration had taken the prudent stand of not accepting its legitimacy and isolating it from the international community.

In short, Obama, the tyro in foreign affairs and the weakling that I said he was a year ago, is squandering America’s power and prestige in his doltish idiotic diplomacy and he is transforming, slowly but surely, the strength of America into weakness at a time when only the power of the U.S. wisely expended can protect Western civilization from the suicidal and deadly sallies of irreconcilable implacable enemies. Who was it in the Bush administration who said that “weakness is provocative?” Former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.

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Critics of the War

The Liberal political courtesans Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich, not to mention the less charming ones of the New York Times, provocatively egged on by their young 'madam' Arthur Sulzberger, are transforming the sweetness of their profession into the bitterness of their politics against the war.

"If the leader is filled with high ambition and if he pursues his aims with audacity and strength of will, he will reach them in spite of all obstacles."
Karl Von Clausewitz